For International Women's Day

Love for tennis forever

Inna Konstantinovna Tikhomirova is a master of sports of international class in table tennis, absolute champion of the USSR, European champion, bronze medalist of the World Championship, since 1992, she has lived in Dubna and worked in sports organizations of our city. For the last five years, Inna Konstantinovna has been a sports instructor at the JINR Stadium "Nauka". She has told our correspondent about how she has come to tennis, how her sports biography has developed.

My father was an honoured table tennis coach of the Tajik SSR but at first, I went in for swimming and showed good results. In order to improve further in swimming, my instructor set a strict condition for my parents to transfer me to a sports boarding school. My parents did not agree, they did not want to tie my fate with sports, I studied well at school. And only in the fifth grade I joined the table tennis team. By today's standards, it is very late, nowadays children have early development. However, the early specialization of children aged 4-7 not yet aimed at sports results almost does not reach the goal, except the case of a gifted child.

My father gave me to his student, he did not undertake to train me himself - parents deal with children either too softly or too harshly, I saw it myself. I had already got initial physical training after swimming, the results appeared and four years later, at the age of 14, I became a master of sports. It is always difficult to break into the upper echelon from the periphery, it was only when I started to win prizes and first places in the championships of the Soviet Union, I got into the USSR junior national team. The European Championship was a successful start - in individual and team competitions among cadets (age group under 15 years old), I became European champion. Later, among adults, I became the USSR absolute champion in three categories at once: individual, women's doubles and mixed doubles. Such an outstanding result had been achieved by only two or three people in Soviet table tennis. After that, I was invited to join the senior team and I became European champion in women's doubles. In 1983, at the World Championship, we won bronze in the team competition. This was a good result, because table tennis is dominated by athletes from Asia - China, Korea and Japan. It was the Chinese that we lost to in the semi-finals.

And then the leadership of the national team changed, rejuvenation began and at the age of 22 I turned out to be old for the national team. But whatever happens, it's all for the best. I got married, had two sons, graduated from the university as an economic engineer. After working a little in my specialty, I realized that the processing of economic information was not for me. I have been coaching since 1989. During this time, I have been invited a couple of times to play for the national team of Tajikistan at the Spartakiad of the Peoples of the USSR, the USSR championships, so I have kept fit all the time.

It was 1992 - well-known events, the collapse of the USSR and by chance, I was in Dubna. My husband's relatives lived here, they sheltered us, we are very grateful to them. For some time, we lived without citizenship, without a residence permit, without money and there wasn't much work in those days. I started to lead the table tennis section at the Dubna Youth Sports School and my husband found a job in Tver. And when our whole family moved to Tver, my coaching job turned out to be in demand there. The city quickly provided us with service accommodation in an emergency five-story building. In 1995, a new building was built at the Stadium "Nauka" and Director of the Stadium Aleksandr Mikhailovich Vainshtein provided us with my coach G. A. Asriyan with a training room. The late Grigory Aleksandrovich also had a difficult fate - he moved to Dubna from Baku as a result of the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict. He and I trained a lot of good students, bright results were achieved by the masters of sports the brothers Aleksandr and Aleksey Zhelubenkovs.

I continued to keep fit, played for different clubs, but I understood that it was getting harder and harder to compete with the youth. Somehow, I happened to attend a veterans' competition. I was impressed by the metamorphoses taking place right in front of my eyes: a man comes to the table with a stick, but starts playing with the energy and passion of a young man, fighting for every ball. In table tennis, the sport of veterans begins at the age of 40 and since 2002 I have been participating in these competitions and have repeatedly become winner and prize-winner in the World and European championships. I also meet with strong Asian athletes, especially with naturalized Chinese that play for the USA, Canada, Australia. There are a lot of Chinese in New Zealand, I have also competed there, the veteran table tennis movement in Japan is very developed. A few years ago, I met a lady from Australia at competitions that was over 100 years old. She was brought to the arena in a wheelchair, she got up, walked and played. You can play this sport until you are very old. Investigations on many parameters of different athletes for strength, speed, reaction time, coordination, endurance and others have been carried out and table tennis has taken the third place, after hockey and badminton. By the way, ophthalmologists recommend it to children with incipient myopia as an effective training for eye muscles.

I also love this sport because, when going to competitions, you don't need to carry large equipment like a cyclist or kayaker and at the same time, this is such a sport that sometimes at tournaments we enter the gym at 9 am and leave it after midnight. This is not an hour and a half of a football match. When I traveled abroad as a member of the USSR national team when I was young, I saw little but a tennis table and a ball. Today, when participating in veteran competitions, I can see some sights, beauties, but this sport is totally at my own expense. Nowadays, the situation, unfortunately, has changed, but we have just competed with Belarusian veterans in interregional competitions in Smolensk, I have won first place in my age group and second - among 50-year-olds.

(End in next issue)

Olga TARANTINA